I had a mental image of what happens when you try to escape by foot: rather than being captured by a giant ball, Village-style, giant walnuts (with little robot arms and legs) chase you down and drag you back.

At this point, with the covered eye pattern continuing, I’m wondering if there will be a horror-movie scene where she’s told Give up your eyes . . . you won’t need them anymore. . .

Say, speaking of eyes, anyone remember Eyeball Razor Chimps?

I have another vague idea that Virginia is meeting aspects of her own mind; each component having been split out. She will interact with them until, presumably, she goes mad or figures out how to beat the system. But fighting with them will only hurt herself. And, when I went to check the archives to make sure I had the phrasing right on the above phrase (and that it was not, say, Razor Eyeball Chimps), I found this intriguing little line from a conversation with Mr. Green:

The mind is its own place, Virginia, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

Beatrix: Inner child, obviously. Probably the part of her that likes watching dumb movies with Nick. Maybe also the part that has enough childlike wonder not to be reality blind.

Melanie: Her focus, maybe? Melanie has a goal in mind (skee-ball tickets for the bus) and she sticks to it.

Mrs Ape: Her uptightness, The part of her that’s always worried she’s not doing the right thing, she’s not professional enough, she’s not doing what’s expected of her. Also, based on her reaction to very mild fakeswears, the part that installed Nick’s filter.

Madam Delphi: Hard to say at this point, but possibly the part of her that is just detached enough from “reality” to be able to reverse engineer mad science. (The fact she’s not a scientist at all reflects Ginny’s opinion of mad science. The fact she’s the closest thing they’ve got possibly reflects Ginny’s opinion of herself for being so good at working with mad science.)

I really don’t know how she’s going to escape. It’s not like I think she _can’t_ escape: it’s just that there are so many Chekhov’s guns lying around at this point I have no idea which one is going to go off. Aside from the apparent fan-favorite solution (her going all the way Mad and breaking out on her own) I can think right off the top of my head three people (for certain values of people) that could probably break her out of a VR hell…

There’s also my continuing assertion that she has already been Mad all along. All the “people” she has met are actually herself (as was so well detailed above). She will escape once she realizes that they are all her, and gets them all to work together.

I am suspicious at the low ceil.. er, lintel. And the sudden bit of pain. I don’t think it was a coincidence. Maybe they are rewiring her brain and they are using this VR as a platform for her to do that. Like with Nick.

The low ceiling might be one of thousands of “convenient and explainable” triggers that the VR environment adjusts itself to mask her feeling real pain.

But the brain is what interprets neurological signals as pain. I have “felt” pain in a dream, while not actually experiencing anything physically painful at the time. So I have no problem believing, even if this is a VR environment, that Virginia could experience what her brain tells her is genuine pain, whether she is experiencing anything physically painful or not.

Or possibly “synergistic”, but if this really is some form of VR then synthetic is the perfect expression. After the last few weeks’ awesome revelations of all the years of subtle foreshadowing I’ve lost the capacity to second-guess our author’s intentions…